My wife researches honey bees in Minnesota and says it's more about the depth of the tube then the cleanliness. She rages about all these "hives" that people sell in Michael's or Target. Pretty interesting stuff.

If you click and open the link in the iOS reddit app, tap the three dots in the upper right and choose open in safari- if you have Twitter as an app this will actually redirect and open it in that, if not it should be more stable viewed in browser anyway (choosing open in chrome if you have that app also seems to view better).

If you tap the ellipses button on the top right once you navigate to twitter from the reddit iOS app, then select “open in Safari”, you can navigate down the twitter page in safari freely. The same annoying popup trying to get you to sign up for twitter shows up, but this time with a little “x” in the top left that lets you close it and move on.

This looks like one of the Costco Mason Bee homes. Yeah, they are a poor design. It's easy to swap out the bamboo for cardboard coated tubes, or whatever works well in your local, but the roof coverage is all wrong. Looks for a bee house that has a deep roof that protects the front and sides of the house from excessive rain and exposure. There are some great sources for mason bee tubes and materials online.

Why would anyone choose Twitter to explain a topic like this? I just want to know so much more but the medium makes it so hard to get to the end without clicking and scrolling a thousand d times then throwing your phone against the wall in frustration...

I have found that Twitter is an excellent place to disseminate information, especially about science. It shouldn’t take any clicks - just scrolling - to read this post. I am a biologist and I share my science and learn so much from Twitter. I highly recommend using, it especially for learning more and keeping up with current science!

Why do you think people shouldn't be clicking? Relying on a single source for information is bad. Clicking is required to verify facts, especially when the author just says "Trust me on this". No, why should I?

Twitter isn't great for what should have been a proper article with supporting links. Here the author gives a fun intro to a topic but all of the images are just eyecandy.

I thought the person above was clicking to continue to read this thread. I didn’t mean they shouldn’t be clicking to find additional information.

This author of this tweet has his PhD studying plant evolution and years of experience studying and teaching evolutionary biology at Swarthmore college. You definitely shouldn’t take everything he says as the final word, but he’s a pretty good source, in my opinion.

For example, I have my PhD in honey bee behavior. I post my work often on Twitter - follow me! @phdbee! If you are reading my Twitter, I am often posting directly about work that I have done and published. That’s what is great about Twitter - you can follow the people who are the experts in the field of the topic you’re interested in.

You definitely shouldn’t take everything he says as the final word, but he’s a pretty good source, in my opinion.

Yeah that highlights what I'm trying to say, though: Twitter isn't super user-friendly for the whole process of checking who this guy is and looking up what he says to see if it's confirmed elsewhere. In fact Twitter is made to have something shared and replied to and then disseminated quickly without any fact-checking, which is why it's such a toxic mess of a platform for so many other reasons. Technology has to serve humans... we shouldn't be shoehorning messages into whichever communications platform we can "just because we can". You're going to reach a lot of people, but annoy a lot of them too and contribute to the mess in the process.

Normally he'd have sent a link to open in a browser. It'd go like this So he apparently has a PhD, fine, let's check if that's true, lets's see what else he's done (needs clicking). Read the article, check all the links (more clicking).

With the way it is now with that whole thing sprawled out in Twitter... well, the fact that it's spread out over 175 dozen tweets can try a reader's patience. I gave up after four and couldn't be bothered to check the article, because someone else is surely going to put all that information into a better format that's more apt to be shared and discussed seriously.

Twitter got a 240-character limit for a reason. Means all sorts of partial ideas are broken up unnaturally and have to be shoehorned in "just to fit"--it becomes bad writing.

Can he send out his message like that? Sure, nobody's going to stop him. Is it a good idea? Hell no. Does it contribute to preexisting problems this particular platform has? Hell yes.

I appreciate your perspective but I disagree with you. Lots of people find the short posts easy and quick to read. And many authors of these tweets are originators of the information. We live in a world of bite sized information - you may disagree with how tweets are written and want a grammatically correct, full thesis, but that’s just not the internet. We scientists fill the niche and give people information in the way most people want. With photos and videos, on twitter and Instagram. If you want more, read my paper or direct message me.

We scientists fill the niche and give people information in the way most people want.

Sorry dude, but not all scientists are great at vulgarization and you're obviously missing the mark if you think everyone wants to read the way you're putting things out.... or that they're even reading your string of 25 tweets to its conclusion.

Good luck either way I guess. I hope you aren't wasting too much public money on this stuff.